Charles Petzold

Tim Sneath today has issued a challenge for "the most impressive WPF demo you can construct in a single line of XAML," by which, of course, he means a single element of XAML.

Here's a single-element XAML file that I've formatted into multiple lines for easier human-parsing:

<!-- "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll, XAML by Charles Petzold -->
<TextBlock xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
           HorizontalAlignment="Center"
           VerticalAlignment="Center"
           FontFamily="Bookman Old Style"
           FontSize="16pt"
           FontStyle="Italic"
           Text="&#x2019;Twas brillig, and the slithy toves&#x000A;&#x2003;Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:&#x000A;All mimsy were the borogoves,&#x000A;&#x2003;And the mome raths outgrabe."
           LayoutTransform="-1 0 0 1 0 0" />

or you can just run or download Jabberwocky.xaml. It's the first verse of "Jabberwocky" as first seen by Alice in the first chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:

As you'll recall, Alice has to hold the poem up to a mirror to read it all. In the XAML the text of the verse includes embedded Unicode characters for line feeds, em-dashes, and the fancy apostrophe. The transform "mini-language" lets a matrix be directly set to the LayoutTransform property to flip the text around the vertical axis.